Proposal - Software Development Industry & Price Statistics Study
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			Robert Hogg
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Background:

There has been much press in electronic entertainment circles that rising costs in the industry are a threat to the
industry's continued commercial survival. The salaries for employees are usually cited as the major problem 
(ignoring taxation rates, which naturally vary with governance) and this is typically due to the increasingly 
large teams of people required to complete a game. In the 1980's, it was common to see a team of 10 people working 
on a game; now, the credits run into the hundreds. A clear correlation exists between these 2 variables of team size and 
development cost, as evidenced by the continuous generational rise in game prices. One can make this assumption
based on knowledge of typical business practice: when production costs rise, raise sale prices to compensate. However, 
the demand for intensely photorealistic graphics in modern games is often blamed for this, as the basic mechanics of most of 
the games we play today were pioneered in the 1990s. 

With this in mind, it stands to reason that typical business and commercial software should be retailing at
a lower price than they have in the past. They do not require flashy effects and graphical flourishes to 
succeed; all they need is an easy-to-use GUI (graphical user interface), compatibility with other popular 
software programs, and the ability to do some relatively simple functions necessary for business administration. 
For example, word processors must make business letters easy to write, spreadsheets must be able to display graphs of
stock prices or sort employees by highest salary, and slideshow programs must make a company look attractive to 
investors. None of these tasks have been all that difficult to program since the introduction of object-oriented programming 
and visual compilers. Instead, it looks like the bigger problem for software companies (Microsoft, Correl, etc.) has been where to go
next. New features that make a huge impact on productivity have grown at a rather glacial pace, to the point where A 
REDESIGNED TOOLBAR was the big feature Microsoft hyped for its new version of Office a few years back. Certainly, it did not
take a lot of money spent on market research or R + D to determine that this was the way to go. However, the products will continue to
sell simply because they work and are trusted. 

So, the biggest change, then, has been in employment. Is the influx of new employees into the software industry 
helping it develop products at a quicker and less expensive pace, or is it dragging it down and leading to 
a collapse in the industry?

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Question:

Are the changes in the retail price of commercial software related to the employment 
of I.T. professionals in the United States? If so, then to what degree are they related, what is the 
cause-and-effect or common-cause factor that links them (if applicable), and are U.S. employment statistics 
a valid indicator of price changes in software bought and sold (albeit not necessairily manufactured) in Canada?

If there is no or limited correlation between the software price index and the employment statistics, 
is it simply because they do not impact each other, or are there better indicators available, such as 
the expansion of knowledge in the I.T. industry, changes in wages for workers, the popularity of 
open-source software, strictly because the brand will sell regardless of price, or some other unseen factor?

Note that while inflation and investment obviously have some impact on this, these are variables whose effects 
are well known and will remain outside the study here. 

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Variables Under Preliminary Study:

Independent: Employment in the Software development industry, U.S.A. (national data 1998 - 2009)
Dependent:   Commercial Software Price Index, Canada

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Hypothesis:

It is predicted that the price of commerical software has declined as a result of more people quickly working to develop new products
without having to spend time developing new features, and that we can continue to use the U.S.A.'s computer science employment statistics
to provide an indication of what software prices will be like in Canada.